Infant Circumcision And Trauma – With Dr. Dean Edell

About This Video

Make the INFORMED decision on circumcision- the ONLY decision you will choose after watching this informative video- don’t circumcise your baby boy OR girl.

If you are planning a hospital birth for your son, you should expect hospital staff to approach you at some point in the first day or two after your son is born to ask about circumcision. There are many long-term reasons to leave your son intact,1 but you may not have considered the more immediate benefits to you and your new baby.

No American medical association recommends infant circumcision as a routine procedure. The reason that American medical associations (and the vast majority of medical associations worldwide) do not recommend routine infant circumcision is because it is not medically necessary.2 And as Lamaze’s Healthy Birth Practice Paper #6 details, “experts agree that unless a medical reason exists, healthy mothers and babies shouldn’t be separated after birth or during the early days following birth.”3 Consequently, unless there is a medical reason to circumcise your newborn son, it is inadvisable to agree to this unnecessary medical procedure.

1. Circumcision Causes Pain and Stress: An infant’s foreskin has more than 240 feet of nerves, 20,000 nerve endings, and 3 feet of veins, arteries, and capillaries — circumcision removes all of them, causing the infant tremendous pain.4 Research has conclusively demonstrated “that circumcision has significant physiologic impact on newborns, mainly due [to] pain.”5 Serum cortisol (a hormone released in response to stress) concentrations increase during and after circumcision,6 and “[h]eart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure increase, and oxygen saturation decreases, during and shortly after circumcision.7

After circumcision, the penis has a raw, open wound. The newborn’s surgically exposed glans is re-injured by abrasion and contaminants because it is encased in diapers (including the baby’s own feces and urine, which breaks down into ammonia). Disposable diapers themselves are also often irritants, because they are laden with chemicals, dyes, and fragrances that cause further pain.

2. Circumcision Interferes with Breastfeeding: Circumcision negatively affects breastfeeding, regardless of whether infants are given Acetaminophen (Tylenol) to help manage pain immediately after circumcision. Some circumcised males are unable to suckle at all after the procedure. Mothers who leave their sons intact have a better chance at establishing a healthy breastfeeding relationship.8

3. Circumcision Disrupts Sleep: After circumcision, babies’ normal sleep patterns are disrupted. Researchers believe this may be a mechanism to cope with the stress of the procedure.9 Infants who do not get enough sleep or enough quality sleep are at risk for additional significant stress.10

4. Circumcision Can Interrupt Normal Bonding and Causes Emotional Trauma: Lamaze recognizes that “[i]nterrupting, delaying, or limiting the time that a mother and her baby spend together may have a harmful effect on their relationship and on breastfeeding success.”11 The significant stress, disrupted sleep patterns, and breastfeeding problems experienced by circumcised babies all have the potential to interrupt the normal, healthy bonding with their caregivers. Bonding is interrupted because “the circumcision procedure frequently causes the newborn to withdraw from his environment[,]” including his mother.12

Moreover, circumcision causes emotional trauma to parents. Over 80% of parents regret their circumcision decision in the first six months of their sons’ lives. 13

Protect Your Newborn: Leave Him Intact

Unless there is a medical reason to circumcise, you and your son can only benefit by deciding to keep him safe and close to your side after birth. The newborn period is so beautiful and fleeting. There is no reason to traumatize your baby or jeopardize your breastfeeding relationship by exposing your son to needless pain and stress.

If, after thoroughly researching, you feel that the decision to circumcise is one that you must make, please wait until after those fragile newborn days. Remember, you can always decide to circumcise, you can never decide to take it back.14

“Circumcised men have more difficulties reaching orgasm, and their female partners experience more vaginal pains and an inferior sex life, a new study shows.”

Sadly, medically unnecessary circumcisions take the lives of too many infants each year, and other children suffer the effects of botched circumcisions their whole lives. Below is a list of some publicly known tragedies, with updates in the Comments section.

A growing number of men who wish they had been left intact (not circumcised) are benefitting from non-surgical foreskin restoration. You can learn more about this at http://www.norm.org/

“Unspeakable Mutilations: Circumcised Men Speak Out” by Lindsay Watson, 2014- In this book, 50 men, of widely differing ages and from varying walks of life, explain how circumcision has harmed their self-esteem, physical well-being and sexual experience.

No national medical association in the world today recommends infant circumcision, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). In its 2012 statement on circumcision, the AAP claimed that “the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks,” yet it also stated that “the true incidence of complications after newborn circumcision is unknown”. The AAP lacks the evidence it needs to make a comparison between risks and benefits.

The AAP’s statement was met with strong criticism from a large group of European and Canadian doctors representing various foreign medical associations, in the AAP’s own journal “Pediatrics.” Infant circumcision is not practiced by most of the rest of the world, except where it is done for religious reasons by Jews and Muslims. You can read what these doctors wrote at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2013/03/12/peds.2012-2896.full.pdf+html

One young man sued the retired doctor and hospital (Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York) where he was circumcised unnecessarily as an infant, against his will and without HIS consent. He received a financial settlement. You can read about his case athttp://www.cirp.org/news/mndnewswire04-29-03/

What if everything we thought and believed to be true turned out to be a story passed down from parent to child through daily, unconscious habits to ceremonial traditions, all designed to help us make sense of our world?

What if the chaos we are witnessing in and around us today is a symptom, evidence even, of an Old Story – the belief in our separateness – breaking down?

Would our fears be lessened and our curiosity piqued if we made a conscious choice to turn our attention toward an emerging New Story? Could an expanding sense of wonder allow room for questions like:

What if babies are conscious? What if sustainability begins with conception? What if Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology?

When we consider the way we create meaning has always been through stories, other questions arise, like, Who wrote these stories? Can they be changed? What steps can we take toward shifting our current, industrial story of a disconnected humanity to a life-affirming and empowering narrative, authored, as always, by US?

Our daily choices and habits are informed by the context, the Big Picture, whether we are aware we even hold a worldview, a personal mythology or a story of our own being and becoming. This revelation is no sentimental notion, but a scientific fact of human conscious development.

Families for Conscious Living and its initiatives like Kindred Media have explored this New Story from the ground up – in grassroots’ communities – and from the top down – with frontier science researchers and social changemakers – for 20 years. FCL’s nonprofit work has been pioneered by families who have sought out insight and solutions to shifting their own awareness from the limits of the Old Story to the expansive, empowering practical wisdom heralded in the interconnected threads of the New Story. This New Story comes with its own language, phrases like Cultural Creatives, Bio-Cultural Conflict, Grounded Expansion, Harmonic Family Resonance, Phronesis and the Ecology of the Child.

What is needed at this time is a safe gathering place, a sanctuary, created with great compassion to inspire and welcome our imaginations to engage in open dialogue, create connected community and identify resources that support an adventurous exploration of holistic, peaceful and sustainable living.

Welcome to that safe gathering space.

Kindred readers are thoughtfully and courageously exploring the disintegration of the Old Story of Separation, the emergence of a New Story of Connection and the space we, as Cultural Creatives, now occupy between these stories. Kindred readers believe the human reach for wholeness as individuals and in community is always happening, even if we can’t find that story reflected in mainstream media outlets, cultural bias, authoritarian politics or our conformist society. This is the need Kindred fulfills as a nonprofit educational initiative: the need to inspire parents, practitioners and policy makers with the evidence of a world transforming through an independent, alternative media outlet that offers the most cutting-edge, holistic insights from the best conscious living authors, researchers, activists and nonprofits.

For a greater understanding of the The New Story, watch Kindred’s editor’s presentation here.

Visit our donation page to find a variety of ways to support Kindred – with legacy giving, monthly tax-deductible gifts, or in your daily online shopping and local dining activities.

Kindred Media and Community is an alternative media and educational initiative of the American 501C3 nonprofit Families for Conscious Living. Please visit our Guidestar page and Great Nonprofits to read our passionate reviews. FCL was awarded a Great Nonprofits Top-Rated Nonprofits seal in 2014, 2015 and 2016 and holds a Gold Level ranking of nonprofits at Guidestar.